INTERSTELLAR: The Hidden Meaning We All Missed | Deep Dive

don't let me leave Murph every single one of these books was hand-picked by Christopher Nolan and buried inside is a root myth of not just a father who misses his daughter but what about his son why does Timothy Charlemagne get hidden behind the Event Horizon of Casey Affleck and who really built this beautiful glorious plot hole I'm Eric Voss and this is the Deep dive Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was so ambitious with groundbreaking visuals and a score from Hans Zimmer that takes us to church but still some viewers felt left in the dust but I think I found something new in this bookcase a different ghost that was there all along in the books themselves we have to dive into this because the film never explicitly reveals who those fifth dimensional book beings were other than it was us but what does that really mean but the answers are all there in murph's bookcase a visual framework in which all the details in Easter eggs of this movie really come alive so after some sepia tone Studio title cards Nolan's opening shot is literally this Dusty bookcase the dust floats in a line due to the gravitational anomaly used by Cooper to reconnect with Murph murph's toy NASA Shuttle here collects dust because in this near future NASA's history has been erased from textbooks rendering these as fictional sci-fi toys like x-wings the lines of dust not only contain the quantum data that Murph needs dust or sand is literally the first thing Cooper sees when he crosses the Event Horizon of the black hole one of the titles on this shelf is LP Hartley's the go-between which Nolan chose for the way the book experiences childhood going through the halls of adulthood and he said that it has one of the best opening sentences of all time that sentence is the past is a foreign country they do things differently there and so Nolan deceives this here by opening this film and what we think is the past a series of interviews taken directly from Ken Burns 2012 TV documentary the Dust Bowl these are all real life survivors of the 1930s dust bowl that affected the American Prairie sharing their real-life anecdotes of how they would have to overturn the dishware but later we learned in the context of this movie these are all star stories told by Future survivors of Earth including an older Murph seamlessly woven in here played by Ellen burstin a screen Legend from a number of titles including the Exorcist oh my that was a farmer like everybody else back then of course he didn't start that way and notice how Murph in this shot is seated in front of her famous bookcase recreated in the space station Museum Cooper's test flight gets shut down from a gravitational anomaly and the voice shutting them down is actually one of the robots like tars robots at this point history would have been made Mission Control commanders establishing Cooper's abrasive relationship with these robots now it isn't ever spoken aloud but the main events of interstellar start in the year 2067. that's a year we get from producer Kip Thorne's book the science of interstellar that established the Wormhole being discovered in the year 2019 which bran says was quote 48 years prior so Cooper's test flight here would be sometime in the late 2050s when he was still a younger pilot Kip Thorne is an astrophysicist who initially conceived of the idea of this movie with his colleague and fellow astrophysicist Linda Ops they both consulted on the film contact which also featured McConaughey bringing in some heart sci-fi they sold the concept of Steven Spielberg who hired Jonathan Nolan to write the screenplay and Jonathan spent four years studying astrophysics at Caltech and then when Spielberg had depart from the project Paramount brought in Jonathan's Hot Shot brother Christopher Nolan and Chris kept most of Jonathan's First Act showing the ecological collapse of Earth but reconceived Acts 2 and 3 with Jonathan as they drew heavily on Kip Thorne's consultation Nolan agreed to two rules from Kip Thorne one nothing could violate established physical laws of nature and two all crazy ideas in this movie must come from some scientific theory and speculation not from the imagination of a screenwriter so to create the black hole imagery of this movie Thorne provided extensive theoretical equations that were coded into the VFX that caused some of the frames of the Symmetry taking up to 100 hours to transfer the result were these beautiful visuals that advanced the academic understanding of how black holes look and function think about that 100 hours per frame that's the Miller's Planet level time dilation there so Cooper's flight was his nightmare I thought you were The Ghost and Cooper jokes that Grandpa is close to being a ghost himself Christopher Nolan always provides the answer to his mysteries in the very beginning of the movie Cooper himself is murph's Ghost and he knows the older generation will always transform into the ghosts for their children you're the ghost future Nolan planted 500 acres of corn in Calgary Alberta Canada just to have the unnatural visual of cornfields with mountains in the background unlike the flat stretches of the American Midwest where corn normally grows we did this to show how corn is now being grown everywhere as one of the only crops left on Earth this future Earth has been ravaged by a mysterious blight that has killed off almost all crops causing dust to Billow depleting the breathable oxygen and reducing Earth's populations severely so that there are no more Wars no more militaries this is similar to another book seen on murph's bookcase Stephen King's The Stand in which people struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic Earth wiped out by a virus the breakfast food on the table is all corn based foods cornmeal pancakes syrup cornbread corn chowder further ahead in the future when Murphy's an adult it's even worse finish your corn fritters corn Sun corn corn now with Murph at the stick the truck blows the tire and Tom says it's Murphy's Law the origin of murph's name which Cooper explains the real meaning of Murphy's Law what it means is that whatever can happen will happen interestingly Amelia later redefines this as the reason Miller's planet was so doomed Murphy's because this planet was so close to a black hole things like comets and asteroids that would have collided with the planet to allow life to form were instead just sucked into the black hole and never got to benefit from Murphy's Law Murphy's Law is actually a good thing that we need this whole film is a demonstration of Murphy's Law we have a plan A and A Plan B and literally anything that can happen does happen here they chase down an Indian flight drone which shows how both the Indian and the U.S militaries no longer exist to patrol these skies and it shows how wired Cooper is to be able to hack it remotely his laptop screen shows Hindi translating to login successful and data transferred Cooper runs his hand along the Drone probably grateful to touch something that doesn't have dust on it and he says Hey the sun cooked its brain or it was looking for something this drone was actually being attracted to the gravitational anomaly on Cooper's Farm which also explains why all the tractors at Cooper programs are going off course something's interfering with the compass magnetism some Sergeant in the parent-teacher conference even the TV is caked in dust and there's a brown dust stain on a textbook because this came from births bookcase making it the dust from one of the gravitational anomaly strands now another one of the books from the bookcase was Greg Mortensen and Dave Oliver relins Three Cups of Tea which is about a school for girls but Morton Sim was later accused of fabricating accounts while writing this book and key to this film is a girl challenging academic authorities who spread these kind of Lies like Miss Hanley here and later Professor brand Miss Hanley believes that the Apollo missions were faked which is so frustrating while watching this movie it shows how in this dystopian Society the lunar Landing conspiracy theory has taken hold to society replacing history to keep these poor kids focused on farming now in real life conspiracy theorists believed that this was accomplished using Stanley Kubrick set pieces from 2001 in Space Odyssey 2001 be in the movie that inspired the Nolans most on this film and we see how all over this room are kids drawings of tractors showing how this school encourages kids to just love agriculture Cooper asks where his tax money is going if there are no more armies it's later revealed that this was going to NASA's Lazarus missions Donald says that when he was a kid they used to build new gadgets every day if this is set in 2067 Donald would be a millennial he says his Earth had 6 billion people which would have been the case in 1999 and he remembers when baseball was good and he misses hot dogs Cooper sums up the theme of this movie we used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt but notice how Dirt is literally caked on the windowsill behind his head he is so blinded by the stars that he is unable to see the answer it really takes Murph a generation raised in this dust to see how the solution to their place in the stars is literally buried in the dirt now at this baseball game there's popcorn and soda and candy more corn we see it's the New York Yankees suggesting they relocated the Yankees to rural areas to just keep this Pastime alive as the Romans say PanAm at circuses food and entertainment corn and baseball is what keeps a society docile Cooper says that in his day people were too busy fighting over food to even play baseball hinting that there were wars fought over the food shortages later Cooper and Professor Brandt talk about the government pressuring NASA to drop bombs from the stratosphere on cities of starving Riders a dust storm hits causing the dirt to float into murph's room pulling down the sand with heavier gravitational pull in the form of these bands which Cooper realizes is binary code forming coordinates you can totally see Steven Spielberg's interest in Jonathan Nolan's First Act because it's essentially Close Encounters of the Third Kind a Restless father connects with an alien signal and leaves his family behind in pursuit of it for Richard Dreyfus it was mounds of mashed potatoes for Cooper it's Hills of dirt as Murph carries a cornbread Sando to Cooper the curtains are all stained with brown at the hems and in the truck they use a rag to keep the dirt from coming in through the AC vent murf hides in Cooper's passenger seat you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me yeah she's more right than she knows Cooper only got those coordinates because his future self was trying to communicate with Murph they arrived to the NORAD facility NORAD is the government branch with bases underground for strategic commandering nuclear strikes makes sense NASA would commandeer these missile silos into their launch bays and centrifuges and we need tars the dots are Braille spelling t-a-r-s Nolan reason that movie robots that are designed to look and move like humans would just not be practical for most functions like War because the human body is not really designed for most things we need it to be designed for and so he settled on the segmented rectangle Which is far sturdier and easier to transport and Cooper hints here that their original function was for combat are you still thinking Marine pal Marines don't exist anymore his rectangular shape is an intentional nod to the monolith of 2001 A Space Odyssey which was in that movie the symbol of Technology the summation of all of our fears all of our hopes and ultimately all of our salvation and yeah there is a reason Apple went with this shape now tars was voiced and puppeted by Bill Irwin who also puppeted case and in both cases was digitally painted out of all the shots but Nolan mixed his audio diegetically with each team and so that it sounds tinny as if it's coming from within the room as opposed to all the leveled up audio of the voices of the human characters tars is my favorite character in this movie and he saves everyone in more ways than you think Cooper meets Amelia brand named after Amelia Earhart her father Professor brand explains how Earth is doomed and he explains their plans to save Humanity plan a solve the gravity equations to harness gravity and turn the centrifuge into a space station that could sustain life off planet and plan B to send these astronauts out to find a new world to populate using human embryos bran calls them the Lazarus missions that sounds cheerful Leisure has came back from the dead sure but he had to die in the first place and bran just stares back grimly because he knows that the real plan is to let Humanity on Earth die so that the embryos could resurrect the species now when Cooper first walks into The Silo at the top are solar panels and when he realizes it's a centrifuge Nolan tilts the camera to show how it has a curved floor like Kubrick's jogging scene in 2001 A Space Odyssey they say how Wormhole was opened near Saturn which in Roman mythology is the God of Agriculture so again the secret of the stars is hidden in the dirt bran singles out the remarkable Dr man shown in the background photos only from a distance in the scene to hide the fact that it is Matt Damon Dr Mann is always described as the best of us and he's modeled on Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's movie version of that Apocalypse Now a man spoken of as having a brilliant mind who loses that mind when he's cut off from civilization it's no mistake that his name is man as he represents the weakness of mankind and this film literally takes us into the very Heart of Darkness a literal Heart of Darkness Cooper says goodbye to Murph but she throws his watch and he leaves her behind yes that book knocked off the shelf is this future self begging him to stay later in the film right by Cooper's head when he does this is Lois Lowry's the willoughbys a story about a group of children abandoned by their parents this amazing music composed by Hans Zimmer was recorded on the Harrison and Harrison organ of London's Temple Church after Nolan gave Zimmer only one page of dialogue that had nothing to do with space or sci-fi it was really just a father leaving his daughter Cooper checks to see if Murph hid in the passenger seat this time with hope in his heart but no this moment always gets me emotional whenever I re-watch it and I love how Nolan mounts the camera on the side of the truck showing the side view mirror perspective matching the camera being on the side of the rocket as the NASA countdown plays over the truck pulling away some amazing time dilation via editing the movie doesn't waste any time showing the launch prep for Cooper leaving his farm feels like he's leaving his entire world behind Taurus cracks some jokes using an indicator light you can use it to find your way back in the ship after I blow you out the airlock and the light turns on as someone who despises sarcasm I would love if humans came with this light and yes this is another 2001 nod to Hal who emotes through his one solitary red light and he turns on the crew sending pool hurtling through space suffocating Nolan commits to scientifically accurate zero sound whenever we cut to outside the shuttle ex might and they talk with the endurance which Nolan based on the International Space Station designing this to look like a clock it is a ring with 12 compartments 12 like the 12 Lazarus Mission Pilots 12 disciples including the Judas Trader yeah it's a surprisingly religious movie for a Sci-Fi epic I like this Nolan inserts a shot of the latching mechanism so that we know later what it means when it doesn't latch properly for Dr Mann bran sends them off with Dylan Thomas's 1947 poem Do Not Go Gentle into that good night old age should burn and Rave at close of day rage rage against the dying of the light which brings us back to another one of the books on murph's shelf selected poems by T.S Eliot Nolan chose this explaining quote concepts of time and space at their most complex are sometimes best expressed through ART rather than science Elliot's four quartets are as thought provoking about time as any scientific text the first of those is T.S eliot's burnt notion which opens with time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future and time future contained in time past and you can totally see how this reflects no obsession with time specifically in this movie in interstellar the past present and future are all contained within each other Cooper asks Amelia oh uh Wolf's practical physicist yeah Cooper can sense in the way Amelia calls him wolf and doesn't really go into much detail kind of awkward energy there that she's totally in love with this person Cooper's empathy is his greatest strength and it's why he was chosen for this Mission Malia says she's looking forward to escaping human evil that's specific to Earth in her opinion Cooper asks if she thinks nature can be evil she says no and he just settles on that's what we take with his hand yes foreshadowing that evil is truly a blight carried by humans like Dr Mann and can absolutely spread to other worlds and other galaxies as they pass Saturn Cooper finds Bromley panicking over the magnitude of space and gives him nature sounds to listen to foreign this also functions as a demonstration by Nolan of sound as a choice makes the viewer appreciate silence in film and every tick bump and orchestral swell as a deliberate Choice with an intended emotional effect Cooper gives a gift of this emotional calm to Bromley and romiley gives Cooper a science lesson on wormholes and why we see them as a sphere he folds a piece of paper in half to demonstrate the bending of space-time and punches the pin through which is how this was shown in Event Horizon stranger things and Thor 11 Thunder but this idea of a two-dimensional hole shown in three dimensions becoming a sphere is explained in another book that Nolan put on murph's bookshelf Edwin Abbott's flatland a romance of many dimensions it's a story of a flat shape who freaks out upon perceiving a three-dimensional object passing through his Dimension Carl Sagan actually summarized this in an amazing segment on Cosmos and so like those flat shapes in flatland these astronauts passage Through the Wormhole looks simultaneously terrifying and soothing like we see the starry background flowing in multiple ways like a bed sheet or a towel being unfolded by slowly tugging one side on under the other and so this way it doesn't look like anything's just been added to space from a VFX perspective as was the case with the wormholes in contact or the hyperspace in Star Wars or that hexagonal grid of the MCU or rather we're just seeing space as we know it folding and sliding around itself Doyle says that they're passing through the bulk their word for the dimensional space beyond theirs they just called the bulk because it's too big for humans to comprehend it's just beyond Amelia shakes hands with a distortion of space-time implied to be Michelangelo's creation of Adam which we later learned is actually future Cooper reaching back to her I've spoken of the eight types of time travel before and Interstellar represents Type 4 it always happened AKA predestination in which the very Act of time travel itself is preordained by fate and weird things that happen in act one of the story are later revealed to be the act of time traveling characters who had always messed with things and the way fate unfolded like in Harry Potter the Prisoner of Azkaban it was me all along or in the Terminator films or what Nolan will later do in tenant You could argue it's the most narratively airtight type of time travel travel as the whole story is contained within a self-justifying system but it does leave some cynical viewers with questions of free will because you could argue that things happen to the characters because the script needed them to in my opinion Christopher Nolan avoids this by structuring this story so that the father and daughter save each other by making this a selfless one-time mission to save all of mankind and by never ever showing the true bulk beings themselves hinting that it's Advanced humans and giving us a kind of free will in that regard but that's not exactly the case for more on that later now as you can probably tell from this Interstellar Deep dive I am a curious person I'm curious about every corner of every frame and everything that I watch and the deeper meaning behind it all it's because I like learning sorry to be this guy but I really consider myself a forever student there's always something to learn there's always a way to expand your brain and what I really like is when learning is easy to do and that's where brilliant.org comes in brilliant.org is the best way to learn math and computer science interactively if I had this in high school I would have loved math brilliant has thousands of lessons from foundational dance math to AI data science neural networks and more with new lessons added monthly I decided to do a few logic lessons because it feels like if I can understand logic more fundamentally it should have some real immediate impacts on my ability to solve problems in real life the logic lessons are awesome there's a whole narrative about robots running the theme park and in the middle of it logic puzzles that really force me to think while still being fun to try everything brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org Deep dive in r or click the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20 off Brilliance annual premium subscription Miller's plan its proximity to Gargantua the black hole causes it to be time dilated so that every hour there equates to seven years back on Earth time dilation is what I call type 3 of time travel fiction where characters will age into the future so that way Interstellar even has a plan A and A Plan B of time travel types to save time Cooper speeds his descent a little Caution would go and get you killed and later when it comes time for Cooper to dock with the endurance and how high-speed spin the robot calls this back Cooper this is no time for caution Cooper tells case I need to feel the air and he holds his seat to feel the vibrations of the Rangers something aviators will do and visibility is poor and they have to trust their gut it's actually where the term fly by the seat of your pants comes from and explains why they don't see those huge waves upon their descent the cloud cover is that thick now since Miller's planet is time dilated with seven Earth years passing for every hour the astronaut Miller would have just landed and died minutes before they land if you look closely at the establishing shot of the ocean there is a single white cap about a third of the way from the left that doesn't disappear right away like the other white caps do that might actually be Miller's wreckage after a wave has passed through Hans Zimmer scores this sequence with these ticking sounds laughs now if you time this we hear about 1.25 ticks per second and if you do the math of the seven years per hour time dilation each tick represents about one day on Earth so with this ticking clock sound Zimmer activates our anxiety to make us feel each day passing Amelia sees the wave in the distance which at first to us looks just like a hill because Nolan has already primed us with unnatural background Hills behind the cornfields in act one and again since Miller just landed there this was probably the same wave that killed her Zimmer heightens the ticks of the score to proceed the reveal yeah not only do the Beats come faster and faster right after the top of the wave is revealed the ticks really strike there as Cooper realized that time is of the particular Essence Doyle has to instruct case to go rescue Amelia and he transforms into a delightful pinwheel but the fact that he couldn't save someone automatically shows why it had to be humans not robots sent on this Mission as Dr Mann will later explain the machine doesn't improvise well because you can't program a fear of death the wave crashes and taking Doyle and flooding their engines stranding them for hours AKA Decades of Earth time Cooper feels guilty for lying to his daughter you wanna make sure your children feel safe and it rules out down a 10 year old the world's ended and they don't realize it in this moment but this applies to Professor brand as well he didn't tell his daughter that Earth was doomed and that planet was a bust because they wanted her to have hope they fire up the ship Amazon yeah he says helmets on because he hasn't yet had time to register that his crew is reduced from three to two or he's starting to see robots as human crew members and as they leave Doyle's body is left floating there or who knows that could be Millers and since time passes so fast here both these people could still be alive they returned to an older romiley aged 23 years four months and eight days now another book that Nolan put on murph's shelf is 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez a story of a multi-generational family but here a bitter reminder that characters in this movie age decades alone in the film's most heartbreaking scene Cooper watches 23 years of video messages his son Tom says finish second in school this girl is still giving me c so yes second in school but the teacher's giving him C's sounds like he's a bright kid but he's being graded on a curve because only the valedictorian would get to go to college and all other kids are forced to be Farmers Poor Tom was never given a chance as chalamet ages an Affleck you can hear his baby coughing and struggling to breathe oh dear and on the next call he says grandpa is buried next to Mom and Jesse their son he didn't make it Cooper sobs to see his daughter his own a each McConaughey's expression alone becoming both a meme and really the iconic image of this decade of pure Agony and Nolan edits from this from Murph turning off the call and we switch to her on the other end one of the smoothest edits and point of view shifts I'd ever seen it happens at the exact midpoint of the film around 1 hour and 24 minutes in a 2 hour 49 minute movie as the crew debates whether to go to Man's planet or Edmonds Emilia makes the case for Edmonds based on Love Alone love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space setting up Cooper's superpower of empathy to be the one thing that the bulk beings need to make him in murf the bridge but Amelia is right they should have followed her heart and gone to Edmond's Planet because Man's planet was a trap Murphy visits a farm with Tom and Lois where they're eating corns to play even more corn on the table also notice how Murph covers the pitcher with a cloth to keep the dust out you may have actually caught outside in the cornfield murph's jacket with that dark collar is very similar to the one worn by Cooper when he was a corn farmer Professor brand confesses to Murph that he lied about plan A equation [Music] as brand shakes his head Zimmer shifts into a more haunting horror film theme it's really creepy at this part of the movie on the way down to Man's planet the ranger hits a frozen ammonia Cloud supposedly the one thing in this movie with no bases in physics because there's no way a cloud could be frozen which is small but visually it creates this effect that man and anyone on this planet is trapped from both below and from above by Frozen death the planet is a death trap man sobs upon waking up from cry to sleep and seeing a human face later he'll tell Cooper what does research tell us is the last thing you're gonna see before you die your children their faces so he's sobbing and relief to have his isolation broken but also at the idea of having no children to mourn him this survival Instinct is what drives him to be the one to be the patriarch of the human race from here forward remember Professor Brand's insistence that the Lazarus crew have no attachments was part of its failure Cooper's empathy from having children gave him an advantage that man the supposed best of the Lazarus crew never had man asks about the others no in our present situation [Music] excuse me any other yes we cut to Amelia she's worried that man will find out about what happened on Miller's planet and judge her for that not realizing that man is actually the morally weakest of them he waited a fraction at the time that Bromley did in isolation 10 years to bromley's 23 and man still lost himself whereas romily held strong romiley I believe is this film's ultimate tragedy Don't Judge Me Cooper he will never tested like I was romily was tested and you killed him man the crew learns that Professor brand lied about plan a and Dr Mann explains that brand new how hard it would be to get people to work together to save the species instead of themselves or their children we can care deeply selflessly about those we know but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight rarely extends beyond our line of sight this is why the bulk beans needed Cooper they needed one astronaut with a direct empathetic link back to Earth across time but also since Dr Mann joined brand in the lie and now makes us suspect anything he has said so far as a possible deception back on Dusty Earth Murph sees a girl wiping dirt off her face this is actually a cameo by Flora Nolan daughter to Christopher Nolan and his wife and producing partner Emma Thomas the production title of this movie was Flora's letter it's widely interpreted that the film Interstellar might have been Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas trying to work through always being so far away from their kids whenever they work on Films around the world I mean this whole film is clearly a family love letter as Nolan also snugged on a murph's bookshelf Emma by Jane Austen a nod to his love Emma Thomas now at this point of the film you'll notice Nolan rapidly intercuts from the space plot line back to Earth as Murph and Getty try to save Tom's family but it's not just chaotic intercutting to intertwine everybody's faiths there are a few sneaky edit overlaps where one storyline comments on the other like as the crew starts to realize Man's planet is uninhabitable Nolan Cuts back to Getty saying it's bad they cannot stay here yeah he's talking about the farm but the edit creates a commentary on man's Planet Too how it is also doomed Dr Man's whole speech to Cooper justifying the power of human connection why he understands his decision to return to Earth is brilliantly revealed to be a self-rationalization for man lying to get them to come save him Cooper calls him a coward and man says yes yes that's the saddest thing about man he's smart enough to know his cowardice he has thought this conversation through dozens of times I'm sorry I can't watch you go through this I'm sorry I thought I could but yes part of his rehearsal was stay and watch as his savior suffocated it's messed up but you can see how he talked himself into this being the right way this is why casting Matt Damon in this role is so perfect he would be playing an uncannily similar role in The Martian the following year but as the likable protagonist so in a meta way this a-lister would see himself as the rightful hero of the story compared to their astronaut suits he has patches of orange like mark watney's suit in the Martian romily accesses Kips booby-trapped archive his data makes no sense yeah the moment Kip is rebooted you can barely hear him say please don't make me this was in Jonathan Nolan's 2008 draft and the subplot was further explored in the prequel comic absolute zero which is written by Christopher Nolan following man's time with Kip man and Kip had feuded over man falsifying the data and man it sent him outside when Kip came back in his final words were please don't make me go back outside but man cuts him off by saying burmanzi which is a trigger word that deactivates the robot so man selfishly tries to Maroon them he doesn't know the endurance docking procedure the autopilot does not says Torres disabled it nice yeah Taurus disabled the docking procedure indirectly following through on his earlier joke to betray the humans by blowing them out of air locks which is exactly what happens to man but it's important to note that Taurus does not defy Isaac asimov's law of Robotics to never hurt humans why because these robots were originally built to be Marines they definitely don't have that law to them they've just been reprogrammed to be helpful in this case but through that programming he does follow that law by making it impossible for man to abandon Cooper and Emilia he saves their lives it's really man's own choice to open hatch that ends his life and I like how the editing doesn't even let him have a noble speech this is about all mankind there is a moment and again notice how we go from sound and dialogue and music too compliments as the air is sucked out into space later when they close off this airlock the sound returns so what follows is obviously the best sequence of the film one of the best of any film the docking it's not possible no it's necessary yeah Cooper's survival Instinct takes over and it recalls another book that Nolan stuck onto murph's bookshelf gravity's Rainbow by Thomas pension a book that was referenced in Brian Johnson's Knives Out it thematically explores what do you do in those last moments before everything ends Dylan Thomas provides the answer you rage rage against the dying of the light and so in this sequence Hans Zimmer's Church organ rages the red glow from beneath their feet as they sink into the stratosphere of Man's planet the dying of the light and when they use those retro thrusters to match endurance's spin Amelia leans with the spin and she blacks out her arm goes up but Cooper leans against it to try to stay conscious he does not go gentle and again the endurance was designed to look like a clock a ring with 12 nodes and now from below it is spinning counterclockwise so Cooper has to match that counterclockwise spin exactly to line up turning back the clock is the solution that he uses inside of the Tesseract so they Propel the endurance out of the black holes poll using Newton's third law the Lander thrust to reading reads lmao1 and lmao2 which I think is a callback to tarza's Big joke of them tossing each other into space which both tars and Cooper do here to give Amelia that extra boost she needs to make it to Edmond's Planet Cooper Zips into the black hole screaming with light flashing over his face like the Stargate sequence in 2001 A Space Odyssey which this part of the movie basically is for Interstellar but Cooper lands in the Tesseract a three-dimensional construct in which time is represented as a physical Dimension using murph's bookcase stretch in Endless bands that Cooper can thump gravity into the first known use of the term Tesseract was actually in Robert a heinlein's 1941 short story and he built a crooked house in which an architect builds a house based on the geometric concept of a four-dimensional analog of a cube and that house folds in upon itself and creates a dimensional Loop within the structure where people can see themselves by looking through one room into another that's how he got the word Tesseract and now in theoretical physics a tesseract is basically that idea a fourth dimensional hypercube with a cube a three-dimensional shape is to a square to two-dimensional shape expand that one rung up what is the fourth dimensional version of that you have an X and Y and a z axis what is a theoretical fourth axis that could also split up from 90 degrees from the corner of that Cube don't freak out weird three-dimensional beings it is literally impossible for us to Batten this but in that Cosmo segment I mentioned earlier Carl Sagan showed a three-dimensional shadow of a tesseract and what that would look like Nolan does his best to visualize it here by going back to the original literary use of the term using a room in a house and Nolan uses the symbol of a bookshelf the summation of human knowledge as the link for Humanity's salvation and you'll notice one of these books is a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in which a medical scientist applies deductive reasoning to solve Mysteries that are often in plain sight as Murph does here also EB White's Charlotte's Web in which messages inscribed by a spider on the wall saves the farm like Cooper does as the ghost but there are three more books that are harder to see on our list David rublewski's the story of Edgar Sawtelle in which a person on a farm solves a mystery using their deceased father's ghost George Luis Borges Labyrinth which is really collection short stories including the library of battle which directly inspired Nolan's infinite Library here and finally Madeleine alingles A Wrinkle in Time in which a girl Meg Murray rescues her scientist father across time in space if you read any book on this list in companion with Interstellar read this one and so Murph finally sure locks it now similarly this film analysis has had its own ghost that was there all along behind this bookcase so the pilot in this photograph is my father Captain Phillip boss this is him in 1986 returning from one of many long Navy deployments before even I was born here he's greeting my mom my sister Suzanne Lucy and Katie and my brother Matthew my dad is awesome my dad broke flight records as an S3 pilot he flew back a captured Terrace to the U.S for trial in 1987 after a top secret FBI raid it might be the coolest thing anyone in my family has ever done and then after 31 years of service he retired from the Navy in 1985 and luckily for me as the youngest member of the family I just don't really have any memories of him actually deploying I just remember him as a dad who stayed for his kids but my older siblings all had different childhoods with memories of a father who was often deployed far away on a mission that they didn't really understand at the time but he was doing what all parents who serve do to make us safe and like Marth I feel like my task as a film analyzer has been to stare at fictional titles trying to understand life from every possible angle until now only now I think I decoded the answer was there all along I am my Father's son my imagination my work ethic my joy my seriousness my understanding that sometimes the impossible is just necessary to get done I apologize for the send mentality but hey if you found this film to be trite consider looking at this overstuffed bookcase from both sides as a scoffing youth and is a longing parent Cooper finds the one exact moment in space-time through which to communicate the quantum data from Taurus to Murph the watch that he had given her moving the second hand to communicate binary code which Murph can use to finish Bran's gravity equation and build space stations to save people from a dying Earth now some of the cynicism around this movie comes from what people consider the oversimplified answer of who built this Tesseract who are the bulk beings who said all this emotion and that beings they're Us Cooper people couldn't build this no not yet one day a civilization that's evolved past the four dimensions we know future beings what humans evolve into so then the question comes why didn't these Almighty future beings save Earth from the blight to begin with well for one the Nolans didn't want to make an Earthbound climate change movie they wanted to make a space movie set in black holes can't fault them for that and therefore their hero needed to be an astronaut who misses his daughter but there is another piece to this puzzle that I think answers everything and many people miss it who else is in the black hole with Cooper in this moment tars the reason Cooper's relationship with Tom I think is left underdeveloped in this movie is that Cooper's real son structurally in this movie is tars remember he called his son turbo in the opening minutes and then later in the movie transfers that nickname to the robots well you better slow down turbo Cooper in this movie goes from hating and fearing robots to loving them because they remind him of Tom and so I believe that the future Advanced bulk beings who saved everyone who designed and built this Tesseract were AI descendants of tars someone who spent more time with Cooper than anyone that is why the Tesseract has a 90 degree quadrilateral design like the infinite 90 degree configurations of tars these AI beans would lack a true soul and would still need a human back in the distant past to be that bridge and they partner that bridge with their ancestor tars to be the other half of that link and you might have also noticed Scrabble on murph's bookshelf and when you rearrange the letters of Tesseract you get secret tars I'm just kidding we are missing an R but you know we were so close so the Tesseract folds in on itself and Cooper is left floating outside Saturn looking like the Starchild at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey and he's brought to Cooper station a giant cylinder using artificial gravity these future humans still play baseball the American Best time that'll never die but if you think about it is the one form of entertainment people in 2067 actually had still and we see how they've made a museum out of their house and a little detail here I love how Cooper wipes his fingers on the table because he never knew this house without dust and evidencing his paternal love for Taurus the first thing he does is reboot tars on his kitchen table next stage some dad humor humor 75 Auto self-destruct team minus ten nine let's make that sixty percent Cooper reunites with Murph who tells them no parents should have to watch their own child die if you think about it Murphy's referencing how Tom had to bury his son Jesse Cooper decides to leave to go find Amelia on Edmond's Planet her instinct to trust her heart was right love is the one thing that transcends everything and that movie proves it by making Edmund's Planet the one that is habitable we went from suffocating dust in act 1 to crushing water to deadly ice and now to warm breathable air Amelia has her helmet off and she can breathe remember as Cooper said in the opening minutes I thought we forgotten who we are now explorers pioneers caretakers Pioneers not caretakers and by staying on floating monuments to Nostalgia Humanity has shifted back into survival mode another caretaker generation so to keep moving forward they need to keep looking for new homes Humanity isn't Bound by one's solar system we are destined to be by definition Interstellar hey thank you for your patience on this deep dive it's the furthest I've gone into a single film and I just wanted to do it right you can support this Channel and celebrate the call to the stars with one of our vas manage shirts at nerd riot.shop subscribe to the Deep dive turn notifications on and share this Channel and its videos with everyone you love follow me at EA boss thanks for watching and do not go gently into the end of this video right right right against the ancient scribe thank you [Music]

Channel: The Deep Dive

Views: 1,323,198

Keywords: Interstellar, interstellar breakdown, interstellar Easter egg, interstellar explained, interstellar analysis, Christopher Nolan, interstellar Tesseract, interstellar docking, deep dive, Erik Voss

Id: ASkz5prADQA

Length: 37min 53sec (2273 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/D0gskull]

I thought this was an incredible breakdown of Interstellar and would love to hear everyone’s thoughts!

[u/Greenmanglass]

Love Erik Voss’s work on new rockstars, I’m always watching marvel and Star Wars breakdown videos on their channel after I see the movie/episode. Thought this was a great breakdown, especially of the bookshelf’s hidden clues.

[u/edehlah]

i started following nr since the first episode of loki. but the latest deep dive on interstellar is top notch.

[u/Few-Cartographer9595]

I've watched interstellar multiple times, every time i only notice foreshadowing tbh